Someone Out There really hated humans. Twenty years have passed since Shiva
I first swept aside Earth's crude defenses and rained down destruction.
Now Shiva V has entered the Solar System, more powerful than any
of its predecessors.

The Shiva cannot be destroyed by fleets of ships: the fleets
have been destroyed. It cannot be defeated by a forceful American President
and his faithful generals: they do not know what to do. It cannot be defeated
by a clandestinely developed superweapon based on new principles of physics:
no such weapon exists.

Only by integrating thousands of detailed revelations, coming from thousands
of different fields of knowledge, can we find salvation. So from Nevada
to China, from the Arctic to the Equator, people of both ordinary and
extraordinary skills will commit their abilities. People as diverse as
an ancient KGB agent, a teenage scam artist, a blind child, and a paraplegic
ex-Marine, will find solutions to small pieces of the puzzle. Almost none
of these people have ever met one another; almost none ever will. Yet
in their billions they will come together. In their billions they will
work as a tight-knit team. For we of Earth have one advantage over the
enemy: though the builders of the Shivas knew enough to use technology
that borders on magic, they never dreamed they would have to face the
combined intellectual might of all humankind, linked and coordinated by...

Related Links:
Excluding the alien battleships, the technologies and other background
elements of EarthWeb are real projects under development at this moment.
Read about how these different features of our future are progressing.

Related Books:
To learn about the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of the
world of EarthWeb, this is a recommended reading list.